Re: Avid says No to NAB 2008

Ron, to follow up on your car analogies, if Chevy suddenly decided to not have a presence in the Detroit Auto Show, but said: "We're not interested in the auto show, but we'll have a presence in town", what would you rate their stock at afterwards?

Even if Avid's strategy is brilliant and I just don't see it, the immediate affect of this move is not massive new sales, but that a ton of Avid users are going to flood whatever off-site location Avid will use, to get reassurance they are not going to wind up like Discreet Edit* users. Non-Avid people who might have been interested in a purchase are now going to sit on their hands and see what happens instead of pulling the trigger on a purchase, and Avid better hope those folks don't see another product they like in the mean time. There are plenty.

Avid has lost control of their own story and these kinds of "death watch" memes become self-fulfilling if people lose faith the company is going to be around to support their purchases. It doesn't help when the last smart move of the company was to couple Avid's indifferent customer service with Pinnacle's fanciful notions of tech support. The fact that Avid is not forthcoming with more detail about their new directions at this stage just allows the negative rumor mill to run wild.

I think the smarter move would have been to keep a scaled-down booth at NAB, just like during WW2 when Ford had no civilian cars to sell, but it made ads that said "when new and better cars are built, Ford will build them", or words to that effect. Keep a smaller booth and make the booth all about the changes, is what I'd have suggested. What Avid has now is a panic, like a run on the bank. How is that good?

Does anyone have a good theory on what Avid is up to next? Avid's biggest strength was and is file management. Some people even joke Avid is a file management system with an NLE dongle attached. Where could such a tech advantage be useful? Where you have massive, massive projects and assets. My own guess or idea of what might happen is, purchase by Google and converting or building an Avid product into a free online YouTube editing and posting and management/access interface. For a small upcharge, you get a plus version that adds more effects or whatever. There you get complete vertical integration, and a huge, worldwide 24/7/365 market. Granted, it's mostly of college guys in their dorms or mom's basement now, but still...:-) YouTube is so amazingly huge, monetizing a proprietary interface to it at even a fraction of a penny per use would generate oceans of cash. More perhaps than Avid got out of being the defacto Hollywood standard all these years. If Hollywood made 400 films this year, that's about ten miuntes worth of one day's worth of uploads to YouTube. I didn't say anything about quality, just numbers.